Thursday, May 4, 2023
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Bunche Hall 6275

This talk examines how two intersecting textual communities, represented in Fang Yizhi’s commentary Yaodi pao Zhuang （comp. 1663）, read the Zhuangzi during the Ming-Qing transition. Prior to the fall of the Ming, Fang was a prominent intellectual, hailing from a family with a long tradition of scholarship on the Changes classic. After the fall, like many Ming loyalists, Fang joined a Buddhist monastic community. Building on his family’s scholarship, Fang characterizes the seven “Inner Chapters” of the Zhuangzi as an extended commentary on the Qian hexagram of the Changes, arguing that the Zhuangzi uses language, just as the Changes uses numbers and images, to show the unity between seemingly opposed cosmic forces. Fang likewise examines opposing and complementary aspects of Zhuangzi and Qu Yuan 屈原（ca. 347–ca. 277 BCE）, figures whom his Chan master, Juelang Daosheng 覺浪道盛（1592–1659）, held as models for divergent ways of confronting a chaotic and corrupt world. Where Qu Yuan sacrificed himself, Zhuangzi survived, but disengaged from political life. Drawing on work from both his family tradition and his monastic community, Fang treats the Zhuangzi as a text that aids in the resolution of binary oppositions that lead to painful attachments and the harmful notion of the self.

Jesse Chapman earned a PhD in Chinese Language from UC Berkeley in 2015, and he has since served as a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University and taught courses at the University of Oklahoma-Norman, the University of California-Merced, and NYU. He is currently a visiting lecturer in History at UCLA. His scholarly interests center on exegesis, the interpretation of signs, and the relationship between technical texts, traditional historiography, and literary writing. His publications include “Unwholesome Bodies：Reading the Sign of the Amputated Foot in Early China”（Asia Major, 2017）, “Lao-Zhuang in the Vernacular：Two Evolutionary Readings,”（Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2017）, “Celestial Signs in Three Historical Treatises”（in Technical Arts in the Han Histories, SUNY, 2021）, and a number of contributions to scientific works using premodern astronomical records from East Asia. His monograph manuscript, Celestial Signs and Classical Rhetoric in Early Imperial China, is under review for publication.

Sponsor（s）: Center for Chinese Studies, Department of History